There's a marvelous free show playing every night
of the week and it's enjoyed a run longer than any play on Broadway (New York)
or King Street (Toronto). Or course it's not visible every night due to cloud cover,
and the light from our cities increasingly makes it harder to see, but have
you paused lately to take in "The Heavens"?
Jim Guthrie is a retired Presbyterian pastor/chaplain with an untiring
passion for the hobby of astronomy. He and his wife, Mae, hosted a small
group of dinner guests on an early January evening and for the
after-dinner entertainment we bundled up against the cold and trekked out
in twos to peek through his backyard telescope. What a show! We found
Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, several nebulae, Orion,
Cassiopeia, and "our sister galaxy," Andromeda. We only had time for the
briefest glance, yet I learned, or was reminded of, so much. What I was
most taken by was when Jim focused the telescope on the area of the sky
with the "seven sisters" grouping of stars also known as Pleiades. We
spent some time picking out the stars with our eyes, and then looked
through the telescope. Suddenly our eyes were opened: in that small
grouping, you could see hundreds of more stars that you can't begin to
see with the naked eye.
The Pleiades is one of the brightest and most visible open clusters in
the sky, is 400 light years away with over 3000 stars. (And in case
you've forgotten just how long a light year is, it is the distance light
travels in one year, which is about 6 trillion miles or over 12 million
round-trips to the Moon.) At least six member stars are visible to the
naked eye, and the theory is that there used to be a seventh star
visible, which faded. (But even a pair of good binoculars will make
additional stars visible in this cluster.)
An interesting footnote is that in Japanese, the Seven Sisters are called
Subaru - which is where the car got its name. Many cultures have tales
and folklore involving this cluster, which is easy to understand, since
it is visible without a telescope. Pleiades is mentioned several times in
the Bible, including (Job 9:9), where Job reflects on the Big Dipper,
Orion, and the Pleiades by name.
With the Psalmist, we marvel, "The heavens keep telling the wonders of
God." In fact, if you read all of Psalm 19, you have to think that David
was out on the hills, where light pollution was practically non-existent,
observing the ever-moving, changing stars and constellations as he wrote:
"Each day informs the following day; each night announces to the next.
They don't speak a word, and there is never the sound of a voice. Yet
their message reaches all the earth, and it travels around the world. In
the heavens a tent is set up for the sun. It rises like a bridegroom and
gets ready like a hero eager to run a race. It travels all the way across
the sky." The stars must have been like a gigantic movie screen for
ancient peoples and hence the stories they developed around the figures
they saw there.
If there are worlds that are "out there" beyond what we can see, that are
beyond our physical sight limitations, why is it so hard for us to
believe that there are realms of being and understanding beyond our
intellectual limitations? Even this small emersion into the "cosmos"
takes me once again to greater faith in the God we cannot see nor totally
understand.
Contributed by Melodie Davis from her weekly column ANOTHER WAY
(http://www.thirdway.com/aw/awmain.shtml)
Comments/Feedback are welcome at her
e-mail box.
Originally appeared
In Daily Wisdom
Plain Papers on the Holy Spirit
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